How Does REAL Change Happen?

You’ve had this problem for years. It shows up at work, in relationships, and in your internal emotional life. You’ve done lots of things to make it better, and some of them have helped for a while, but it still seems pretty stuck. You want help, but you are reluctant to get into therapy (again), because the process seems so slow and you don’t want to keep going over all the old stories. On the other hand, you’ve done your share of quick fixes-exercise or hypnotherapy or weekend workshops-and you want something deeper, more permanent and meaningful. You want your problem taken seriously, but you don’t want to focus on that; you prefer to be focused on your goals and your future.

You want real change.

Can Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) help people make profound, life-impacting changes? The simple answer is “yes.” But it’s worth knowing just how NLP does that.

Have you ever had these kinds of thoughts and questions as you’ve struggled with your issues?

• I think this problem is going to be with me forever
• I don’t know how to be myself
• I think I may be living someone else’s life
• What is the purpose of my life?
• I wonder if I need to change everything to be happy
• I’m not living the life I was meant to live

Questions and thoughts like these indicate something more complex than a simple behavioral issue: you are trying to work out change that has to do with your very sense of self-your identity. Who am I? What am I doing here? Most of my clients, at some level, are working out these kinds of questions.

Now, let’s imagine that NLP changed your identity to one more congruent with your sense of self in a single session. If suddenly that was done to you, and you got a whole new identity, it would nonetheless feel utterly alien and simply not you. There’s a word for people who suddenly and rather completely feel like they are not themselves anymore: “crazy.” We feel crazy if our identity changes too much too quickly. It’s not, frankly, a nice thing to do to someone.

So when we are trying to do change work with our identity, and transform it so that it is more congruent with who we really think we are in the world, we have to do it slowly enough so that we can re-adjust and feel good about the changes. When we do that we come away with the sense of a new freedom, possibility, lack of limitation, and  fulfillment, rather than a sense of instability, insecurity, and ungroundedness.

Now, even good change will usually have some quality of instability. The parts of us that have felt like they’ve been doing a good job of managing our previous sense of selves (no matter how unhappy that sense of self may have been), now feel like they are out of a job and rather confused. Some internal re-adjustment is usually necessary, and it can feel a little weird, slippery or uncertain. But it’s within a range that makes it okay, and it’s accompanied by a sense of hope and possibility that is deeply satisfying. This carries you until the confusions work themselves out and you can’t remember what it was like to be any different than you are now.

How long does this take? There’s no good answer, but if the desire for change is big enough, it rarely takes less than three months, while most people feel substantial change by the end of six months. That may seem like a bit of time, but for those of us who spent years in therapy, six months can feel like a miracle. Besides, your former experiences deserve the respect not just to transform them overnight; we’ve had our experiences for a reason, and allowing some time for them to work themselves out seems like simple decency and respect to ourselves and our complex lives. Finally, although the changes may take a some months, clients always feel some change happening by the end of a session that reassures them that things are on the move, and shifts that matter are taking place.

This NLP approach is what really works for those big life changes. I invite you to give it a try. Call me for a free thirty minute phone session so that you can experience how my work creates real change that lasts.